ADMR – Dumb Money is TOTALLY worth the money
As promised, Average Dude is giving you a twofer this week and I am happy to be able to heartily recommend Dumb Money for your consumption.
This story should be fresh in everyone’s memory, as it happened a mere two-ish years ago during the height of the pandemic. Dumb Money is the story of a lone content creator named Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who went by the online sobriquet ‘Roaring Kitty’. He had some small following as an ‘everyman’ stock market educator, sharing his routine and methods on how to research and track stocks (all disclaimers were issued, btw). He always showed his receipts after market closing. Roaring Kitty seemed to be on the level as a truly good guy, fully transparent.
NERDS UNITE!
And so it happened that one day, he saw a stock that he believed to be undervalued and sank his life savings into it (something like $50k). Using a service called Robin Hood run by Vlad Tenev (a marvelously douchy performance by Sebastian Stan), which purported to allow stock transactions with no fees, Gill invested in GameStop (GME) and posted his purchase and reasons for the decision on his podcast (‘I like the stock!’). And that’s when things got interesting. Really, really interesting.
According to the movie (and all news stories that I can remember) GameStop stock became the focal point of an amazing little guy movement. Using the Robin Hood app, small investors (which have been dubbed ‘Dumb Money’ by the big investment firms) started investing in GameStop. Like, a lot.
And the little guys made money. Like, a LOT.
This caught the attention of one of the big hedge fund firm managers Gabe Plotkin (played by Seth Rogen) who saw an opportunity to make money by basically betting on GameStop to lose (called shorting the stock). The more money the giant hedge fund poured into GameStop, the more little guy investors bought and held the stock. A true organic uprising of the masses standing their ground and refusing to ‘take the money and run’.
Inspiring stuff
So, the crux of this story is ‘who will prevail? The little guy(s) who battle the established financial elites? Or Melvin Capital and their big hedge fund cronies, with all their expertise and money and power?’ If you followed this story at all, you already know the answer to this. The story seemed to catch the world’s attention for a hot minute and then the MSM moved on to the next shiny object. This movie gives us all the closure that we had forgotten we wanted. We got to see some resolution to the epic. And I have to say, it was really satisfying.
A perfect analogy for movies in general
Was Dumb Money enough to give the Average Dude hope that we – the unwashed masses – can triumph over the elitists of the world? Not really. The game is just too rigged against us. The best that we can hope for is an occasional lightning strike like Roaring Kitty to give the big shots a well-deserved black eye. It may not change the overall outcome but man, is it satisfying in the moment.
I’m giving Dumb Money a heartfelt 4 out of 5. Everybody (except for the Coriolanus Snows of the world) loves an underdog. And Dumb Money is a real-life underdog story that literally could have happened to any of us. That is comforting and some tasty food for thought.
Check out our awesome movie merch at https://www.barredlands.com/
Follow me on Facebook
PC Loadletter at Lights, Camera, ACTION!
#DumbMoney #BarredLandsdotcom #AverageDudeMovieReviews